At least one Ottawa psychologist says he’s had new patients arrive at his office seeking help with Trump-induced anxiety caused by the flurry of changes — or perceived threats — announced since the American president took over Jan. 20.

“I’ve had people come in and say, you know, for a matter of a couple of days, I was just so shaken I felt I needed to come and talk to somebody,” said Dr. Qadeer Ahmad, who practises at Gilmour Psychological Services.

He said worries about a Trump presidency began to surface during the election campaign last fall.

“Once he got elected, I started calling it ‘Trump stress,’” he said this week.

“There were people who would come in to talk about their typical issues but who just felt the need to spend a good chunk of time talking about what’s happening, how it directly affects them and what is going to happen to the world.”

Specifically, he said, patients talked about the possibility of new wars, the revocation of rights or privileges — especially involving sexual orientation — problems with travelling south of the border and restrictions for immigrants. And, he added, “they’re worried it could spill over here.”

Nor is it just the odd patient, he said.

“No, it’s a general point of discussion for a fair number of people coming through here. I would say a majority will make some comment.”

The other aspect Dr. Ahmad brought up was the difficulty of escaping the Trump news cloud.

We hardly need a PhD in psychology to remind us that, for now, it’s Trump’s world and we’re just passing through. To read the news these days is to drown in the stuff.

News sites have become Trump serials or albums of the weird. The New York Times had at least 13 Trump stories on its site Sunday, then I gave up counting. (The best Trump headline: Me, Me, Me, Me, Me.)

And just try to change the channel. Sports? Oh, there’s Tom Brady, Super Bowl superhero, being asked about his friendship with Trump. Switch to basketball, as Dr. Ahmad tried? There was Toronto Raptor Kyle Lowry being asked about the travel ban.

Stick with Canadian news? Oh, there’s Trudeau being scolded for being soft/silent on Trump, or Leitch and O’Leary being compared to Trump, or the Quebec City mosque massacre being positioned with Trump.

Comedy? There’s SNL doing a takeoff on his press secretary, for Pete’s sake. Walk the dog then, in the fresh air? “Did you see Melissa McCarthy last night?” asks my neighbour innocently, as she snapped on cross-country skis along an NCC trail.

You can’t escape — it’s like a cloud of gas we’re all inhaling. And it’s only just begun! What is the effect, one wonders, of four years of collective anxiety, of waking up every day to wonder if the anti-politician has mixed up his Twitter handle and the nuclear codes?

I called an acquaintance who is a psychologist in private practice. People are not breaking down the door since inauguration day, but he too said Trump jitters are regularly coming up in therapy.

“I would say, without a doubt, it is fuelling people’s anxieties and my clients, too.”

During counselling, he says he tries to steer discussion away from Trump and down other paths. “Mainly, it’s they can’t believe Americans did this. That’s the big thing.”

He’s noted how many people are just trying to figure out how Trump’s brain works, as though we find comfort in political predictability but anxiety in this avalanche of change.

He pointed to the Johns Hopkins psychologist who, more or less, violated professional etiquette by going public with his opinion that Trump is a “malignant narcissist,” or the scariest kind.

It isn’t hard to find evidence we’re getting a little unmoored.

“The country is in the throes of a major epidemic, with no known cure and some pretty scary symptoms. It’s called Trump Derangement Syndrome, or TDS, and it’s rapidly spreading from the point of origin – the political class – to the population at large.”

So began a late December opinion piece in the Los Angeles Times by author Justin Raimondo.

“In the first stage of the disease, victims lose all sense of proportion. The president-elect’s every tweet provokes a firestorm, as if 140 characters were all it took to change the world.”

The piece was accompanied by photos of Trump with a Hitler-like moustache.

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